


The Trace

by lunariviera



Series: The Halves [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abstract, Depressed Dean, Insomniac Dean, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Literary Theory, M/M, No Dialogue, No Plot/Plotless, No Sex, POV Second Person, Philosophy, Pining, Poetry, Prose Poem, Theology, Traumatized Dean, castiel is a warrior, god has left the building, jacques derrida, nonfiction fanfiction, prose poetry, there are stars though, william blake printer & engraver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:22:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1912569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunariviera/pseuds/lunariviera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find<br/>Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find<br/>This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found<br/>It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed<br/>In this Moment Ololon descended to Los & Enitharmon<br/>Unseen beyond the Mundane Shell Southward in Miltons track<br/>(William Blake, <em>Milton</em>, 35:43-48)</p><p>A hunter stands in a parking lot, and prays to an angel who doesn't show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Trace

**Author's Note:**

> The other half of [The Flare](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1960242).

> _The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace….In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read._ (Jacques Derrida, _Speech and Phenomena_ )

•

—It was the same night, this night, every night, such nights, these nights when he would, when he would feel back along the edge and touch the pull of it and ask—

—when finally his brother would close the laptop with a sigh, stand up and stretch, and slouch into the bathroom, discarding clothing as he went, to shower before bed; then he would slide off his own bed and step outside the motel room, on the pretext of getting something from or organizing something in the car, though he didn’t really need a reason, and his brother probably knew that without being told or having to wonder; although it is true that when you live from a car, the rearranging and sorting and straightening must be kept up continuously, or else mutinous objects will seek out their natural lapsarian state of chaos, and when the fight is on and you have to lay your hand on a sharpened loaded cocked easily accessible tool, you don’t have time to grope around food wrappers beer bottles jumper cables socket wrench sets, you depend on being able to place your hand immediately on precisely what will be useful, to have a problem seek out the solution deploy it immediately, question answered, solvents dispersed, that direct line between _seek_ and _find_ , _want_ and _get_ , it was the only way he knew to be, to stay alive—

—but even so this restructuring of objects has never been why he slips outside. The trunk of the car already completely tidied, orderly and rectified, he did that before dark every day, right after they checked in. He learned from his father that angry men above all others must be meticulous, and so he was, precise and fastidious with things, oil changes brass shell casings the lips of women. But this was a different need to sort and make right, a straightening of two halves to happen before something like sleep—

—first he needed to step out into and enter some space larger than the limiting small cubic volume of walls and ceiling, always the grid of dimpled off-white soundproof tiles that he stares up at for too many hours, lying disciplined immobile soundless while his brother sleeps and until he eventually passes out for a few hours and wakes to the same ceiling. He has never permitted himself to think about the kind of house he would have, if he had a house, he will not, he always knew he would never have a house, but in the back of his mind somewhere unexamined the point of having the house would be to have the outside of the house, a space with grass or sand, rocks or trees, where you could slip out at night and feel, and catch it, catch yourself—feel that something, that one small moment, that breath or gap, that brief exhalation before the next inhalation—

—feel a softness, an air on his face or the bare skin of his forearms and backs of his hands and nape of his neck, wherever not concealed by thick clothing, whatever the weather wants to be when it touches him, he would feel that and be aligned with it in a way he couldn’t have explained to his brother, even though his brother was the magic one, the gifted younger son with prophetic dreams wild blood unpredictable alliances. That was not his, his to be responsible and hold the catastrophic at bay, not nestle against it, not listen to its breathing, not be its familiar, its intimate. But this was the quarter-hour he, without thinking about it, without quantifying or qualifying, allowed himself once in every twenty-four. Just a permitted space, it hardly counted, the length of a cigarette break, even a soldier or prison guard will leave canvas tent or cell blocks to stare for a few blank seconds out across over something wide—

—tonight it was mild, they were in a southern city and it was a late spring, the air clung, heavy and wet and smelled of a vaguely sugary flower but more importantly the sky had cleared and there were stars, faint and wavering in a half-lit haze, and a space between them that he had never even tried to find words for, only something also cleared when he stood beneath it. He leaned against the car, still hot but no longer making its comforting clanking settling-down sounds as the metal cooled and shrank, leaned against the side farthest from the room, the side that looked out across mostly empty parking spaces toward some weedy half-reclaimed vacant lot where peepers and chittering insects lived their lives amidst rubbly brick broad-leaved grasses concrete-devouring vines. Without trying, his mind went utterly silent and for these few minutes he did not gauge distances or listen for threats or calculate strategic angles vectors points of pressure, simply took another breath, folded his arms across his chest, looked without focal length up into the darkness and thought of nothing—

—but now this was the second half of the act, the other part of the routine, the final piece and pause before going back inside and resuming himself and his habitual methods, before locking the doors and setting and checking and rechecking the wards and sliding a full magazine into the handgun and placing it in close reach and pouring the next to last of the slugs, this was the one thing he said through the window slit before he wound it shut—

—not even words, not even a sentence or sounds with meaning, just the tones of the repetition of an inquiry never answered but yet somehow always it must be asked, it was that time of the day, the end of the day, the torqued ritual sounds that had to be muttered before sleep as formally as an exorcism rite or the words of a spell, he could not have said when they became necessary or how they had evolved into a set text but this is how it was—

—without his noticing, his eyes would gradually of themselves shift and drop from the sky to the horizon and then he would find himself looking at the ground, at gravel or asphalt, oil slick or black tar or glittering mica, and if he were looking down this meant he had bowed his head despite himself, he knew he was stiffnecked and proud but when asking it seemed more honest to bend a little, to soften or show a subtler side, not to say more submissive (it was more submissive) but maybe a modesty or patience, this was the way it needed to be said, the physical gesture of willingness to accompany the sounds—

—and the sounds are a rough whisper, or not even voiced, he doesn’t always know whether his lips move, whether he is singing or on certain nights screaming, it might be that it is utterly silent, it might be he begs or husks incoherently like a desperate lover or a parent pleading for a child, for himself, it is the one thing he lets himself ask only for himself, it is a moment, that moment where the space from the sky has moved inside his chest and now is pressing apart his rib cage and stretching out the torn muscles of his heart and something wells up within and it is large, as above so below, the outside has come in, and now he is filled up with the space and he can ask—

—and all he really ever says is one syllable, one name, again and again—

—there are no real words to the asking, no structure, this doesn’t have a methodology or an order to the ceremony, this is not a sacrament, this isn’t like field-dressing your weapon with a timer ticking to one side or being tested on how rapidly and accurately you can set up the ingredients in the crucible and how unerringly and soundlessly and without grimace you can drag the heavy knife across your soft inner-arm flesh for the last element to drip into and make the broth speak or summon or seal shut a portal, this isn’t like that but it is like that, but this is not written in any hunter’s journal or scholar’s grimoire, this is an utterance that comes from the middle of a body when the body has palms and footsoles and a scalp and lungs and ribs, the same ribs on which love scratched his name, and deep inside something like a scent or a spoor or a cracked branch, a path toward that which you track, following broken droplets or a muddled hoof impression or a ripped cobweb, the thing that draws you along after it by its very withdrawal, that you know primarily only by the rich shape of its absence, a blinding blue-white light against which you involuntarily shut your eyes only to see its inky distinct shape printed ragged against the backs of your eyelids, the originary trace remains redolent and never quite shifts or flees or is molten entirely—

—though during the course of a day you can lose touch with it, you should, its vestige must slip to one side, other quarry must be what you keep unswervingly in a line of fire to anticipate any panicked changes of direction, rub your spittle-slicked thumb against the sights to clarify the edge of trajectory and how to intersect metal with the thing you need to return to liquid before it does the same to you—

—so only in this small grain of a moment can you reach carefully off to one side of everything else and find its hand inside you again, still curled gently around your spinal cord, a line stretching between down and up that pulls and pulses all along through the length of your being, and then you can, you can exhale the name where no one hears not even you, not even the one you address, it is a question that does not count because you didn’t ask it and so when there is no response it will not wound or enrage or affect you at all, because you never said it, you weren’t even there, there is nothing to see if nothing happens, there is no one to not come if no one was ever called—

—[the ravening flicker her blood spattering down his tears hot against your collarbone, she was the only one who had stood between you and an endless series of explanations and decisions and tasks and actions to justify your taking up space existing and breathing air, so when you pulled your brother more tightly into your arms and in the hindbrain you do not acknowledge became aware right then that it would never be okay after that, but that you would find a way to be okay with never being okay again, you have done this, without even knowing you were doing it, only except for this small nightly broken-stemmed moment that wilts and smites you quietly and you take it without expression like a father’s drunken blow to the face, you don’t get to ask, so you can’t ask, so you don’t, this isn’t asking, this is a posture, this is an expression, this is a figure of speech also known as nothing]—

—[but there is some small pulsing trace of what it was like, what it must have been, to fist your hands sleepily into cloth smelling of cleanness and warmth and draw near and be held rather than holding, be kept safe rather than keeping safe, be watched rather than watching, be cherished, an imprint of this, the scent of vestige, a soft brand, something still in you that would thrill if given freedom to draw near, stop, put it down, set aside: to give open unfurl accept match cling _move_ ]—

—[a beauty, a lingua franca to wrap and spin inside your soldered mouths, without ever having known this even for an instant you still know exactly how, the hot sweet sweep of it, something you could dig your fingers into for strength instead of injury, finally to step around from behind the elaborate trading of blows because I need to put my skin on yours and that is the only way I can find to do this, the only manner in which it might be allowed, how can I press this bonehouse brainhoard indissolubly into and against and inside this, its like and same, to mirror and marry not an equal temperament but a justified one, an enantiomer, the bruises you are always trying to summon to the surface and the sigils you are forever carving in your skin, the words WHY and PEACE written each on a thigh, that these should be set there at last by another, out of something that is the same different rhythmic sorcery, that if you knew such a word you might call _love_ but it feels more like descending down into so instead you think of it as a _fall_ ]—

—[but the falling is gone, the fallen left you and even in your presence you still could see barely a point-zero-millionth of the radiance, even fallen, not meant for trench fodder like you (a green-eyed, an ate-up, a bag of smash, a crunchie, a death technician, grunt jarhead plug built to spill); instead peerage fights his battles as if on horseback at a windswept distance on a hill, nobility’s warrior, another son lost from birth defathered but of high station, a remote and inaccessible degree; this falling that you want to call to you, he rages slays destroys in a colossal form you cannot imagine or apprehend, with a war cry that pulverizes sheet glass and a eyesocket-scourging visage, you know what kind of love this is: that obliterating, that you obviously cannot have deserved]—

—then there is the pause. There must be. You can’t help it, there has to be a pause. Nothing will come, nothing ever comes, but it is part of the pattern, the path, is this half-an-instant’s wait at the end. You finish breathing the syllable, and inhale back the air you lost in the requesting, now you dutifully wait, in the meantime already gathering and respooling back into an unmet, unresponsive silence the threads of your same self, the old self, the quotidian self, this self that is you and its plural necessities: cases trials names places hours dates traits collections of information, you return to it, no emptier than when you walked out of the room into the night, no sadder, feeling no additional loss because you had nothing before and you have nothing again now, only more room from molecule to molecule and a sense of having made an essay, a rightminded attempt, of having shown a willingness for it to be some way other than the way it is—

—but it is this way. Out of long-standing habit you flick your eyes slightly to each side and slightly behind you. Whenever the answer does come (it never comes) that is where you’ve found it. And this is a service all but fetishized, you perform the office faithfully, irrespective of response or acknowledgement. It is yours to do and at the bottom of the smallest interval or increment of time you do it for you alone; because you _are_ alone.—

—You are alone, in the parking lot. Behind you the room has gone quiet, the shower turned off, the television turned down, the lights turned out. You have done what you came out to do, slowly you shift your body from leaning against, lift to the balls of your feet, the center of gravity from which you are used to prowl and pounce, you right yourself from the moment's hushed declension and move back toward the inside, the situations, the way in which you came up, the lifestyle, the job, the beat. If you smoked, this would be the quench of the ember under your heel. Without enmity to crush, an amen is one last flicker of the eyes to above. Nothing blazes, nothing falls, all remains fixed in its place far over and away and never for you.

—Wipe your hand across your taut eyelids, rub at the sore juncture of nose bridge and forehead, swallow dryness as the door clicks and you are back in the stifle and stuck of it, bring down the paper-wrapped glass and fill it with translucent warmth to keep you stilled when nothing else will hold your heart in mind. If you can never know that you did nothing wrong, pull its thread around you to serve as well as a blanket, or arms,—

—though this may be true: that some part of you remembers, some part of you has collected what was offered: that for those who stand in the dark alone and look directly up, anyone can see, if they are seeing: an embrace: the long spiral seed-milk sprawl of stars so far away they never had names or were suns for anyone: the curved arm of the galaxy always flung around us, even when sprawled under acoustic ceiling tile on top of the bedding still in all our clothes, bottle tucked securely in armpit, shod feet crossed at ankle, automatic within arm’s reach, alertness within eye’s opening, ever vigilant, ever invalidated: that even so, whatever evilly scarred nuisances we imagine and script ourselves to be, unwatched unchristian godless neglected unworthy: that even so, there is that in you which has not let you drop, has not left you alone, rocks you through the endless falling and holds you in her circle through to your last righteous day which comes to you only in order to end you, and when it comes will give no quarter no recollection of self no relief—

—no question no answer no blessing no fallen love and no night.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you really read this? If so I love you. I [tumbl](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com) and [tweet](http://twitter.com/jsalowe) so come find me and complain.
> 
> The whole "we are drawn after what withdraws from us" schtick is from Heidegger, and "as above, so below" is a well-known epigram associated with hermeticism. Also "I know what kind of love this is" is a lovely creepy sad nineties-era neo-folk song by [The Nields](http://nields.bandcamp.com/track/i-know-what-kind-of-love-this-is), and the part about cutting words into skin comes from [this admission](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K49Sjn6K6wc) by Misha Collins. Finally, [Barbara Kruger](http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html) articulated visually the observation about [hitting what you're not allowed to touch](http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/images/BarbaraKruger-You-construct-intricate-rituals-which-allow-you-to-touch-the-skin-of-other-men-1981.jpg).


End file.
